Other Jonas stares back, trying to fight his way through a fog of liquored confusion. “I . . . they’re mine.”

“I doubt that very much.” Indeed, this Jonas appears as though he can barely calculate the tip at a restaurant.

“It was—it was a while ago. Before . . .” He glances down at the bottle hanging limply in his hand.

Victor recognizes the look in his eyes as shame. “He came here, didn’t he? The other you.”

Other Jonas tries and fails to fight through the haze of booze, stammering for an answer. But Victor has no interest in waiting. He resumes reviewing the equations. The formulae are rendered in an erratic hand, but he recognizes the math.

“Your doppelgänger,” he says, “the Jonas Cullen of another universe, a parallel world. He came here, didn’t he?”

“Who are you?” Other Jonas asks again, now seeming more frightened than confused.

Victor turns and lasers in on Other Jonas. “He was here.”

“He’s gone now,” Jonas responds.

“Where did he go?”

Other Jonas shakes his head. “I don’t know.”

Victor’s forearm pistons out and pins him to the wall with enough force to sway the lamp overhead. “But you know something.”

Victor watches Other Jonas’s expression change. Slowly, fear and confusion transmute to anger at this stranger who has invaded his home. Victor watches as defiance wells up in the man. “I told him where to go.”

At first, it sounds to Victor as though Other Jonas is claiming he told his doppelgänger to go to hell. But then Other Jonas repeats himself. “I told him where to go.” This time, the words come out less defiant. Simple. Almost plaintive. I told him where to go.

Keeping the man fixed to the wall, Victor glances back at the equations. A terrible epiphany begins to take shape. “You found another one,” Victor says. “You found another universe where she’s still alive.” The words spill out with reverence and awe. Somehow, this addled drunk has found something Victor had deemed impossible.

Victor looks back at the math on the walls. He scans the equations, eyes flying across the formulae, trying to pluck the universe’s location from the numbers and symbols on display.

“It’s not there,” Other Jonas says. “The location of that universe. That’s what you’re looking for, isn’t it?” Victor doesn’t answer. “I wrote it in a notebook. The other me took it.”

Victor returns his focus to Other Jonas. “Why didn’t you use it?” he asks through gritted teeth. “Why are you even here, in this universe? Why aren’t you with her right now?”

Other Jonas explains his predicament. The news that Victor will eventually lose his ability to slip realities chills him. He feels himself blanch. A smug grin takes shape on Other Jonas’s face. “You’re slipping realities too,” he says, his voice laden with realization. “Another explorer. Well, explorer, the concept that your cells might eventually lose their ability to travel the multiverse is something you might want to concern yourself with,” he taunts. “Wouldn’t want to find yourself trapped in a universe that’s not your own.”

Victor shrugs off the jeer, relinquishing his grip on Other Jonas. Victor’s fingers run across the surface of his tether bracelet, manipulating the capacitance sensors built into its housing. “You look quite miserable here,” he tells Other Jonas. “I’m glad.”

The bracelet glows, lambent with power. Space folds in on itself, and a second explorer of the multiverse blinks from Other Jonas’s apartment.

NOW

Jonas throws himself into the city, plunging into an ocean of light and steel, glass and neon. A multitude of humanity swells around him. He flows into the current and walks, swimming in a sea of anonymity.

It dawns that he should have asked Other Jonas for money before he left. But he could no longer resist the compulsion to get away from his doppelgänger. He had no longer been able to face himself. Literally.

And so he walks. And walks. And walks. The night air is bracing. He tells himself it will bring him the focus he needs to think and figure out his next move, but the truth is he’s just cold. So he walks faster. And thinks. And thinks.

He reaches into his pocket and feels the paper folded inside. His doppelgänger’s work. The quintessential answers to the test. His salvation. If he can leave this universe and travel to another that has a CERN. If he can gain access to its Large Hadron Collider or an equivalent machine. If Other Jonas’s math holds and he’s properly calculated the universe where the third and final Amanda is still alive. If. If. If. And all without help or money.

A neon sign across the street winks in the darkness. A tattoo parlor. Another coil of neon announces ATM INSIDE. It’s a burning bush, a sign from on high. A plan takes shape in his mind.

He drifts across the street and into the shop. Every surface is either ebony or glass. It smells of incense and cheap pizza. His arrival draws curious stares.

Jonas pushes toward the counter, where the cash register is manned by a guy in his late twenties. His face and arms are given over to a tapestry of dragons whose forms undulate over each muscle. Fire issues forth from fanged jaws, flames dive-bomb toward his wrists. If he has a patch of skin on his body not covered in ink, it must be under his clothes.

“Help you with something?” the man behind the counter asks. He makes no effort to hide the annoyance in his voice. He looks like he’s getting ready to tell Jonas that the restrooms are for paying customers only.

Jonas pulls the calculations from his pocket and lays the paper down on the glass counter. “I need this done.”

Dragon Man picks up the paper and smirks. “Well, this is new. Ain’t nobody asked me to ink ’em up with math before.”

“But you can do it.” Jonas doesn’t ask so much as assert, willing the answer he wants.

Dragon Man considers, his attention never leaving the equations. “Quite a bit here. You’ll be more comfortable if we spread this out over a few sessions.”

“I need it all done tonight.”

Behind Dragon Man the wall is covered with artwork and designs. Fodder for potential tattoos. A menagerie of religious symbols and superheroes and a variety of flowers to rival any nursery.

Jonas points to one. “That one too,” he says.

He pulls up his sleeve to expose his un-inked forearm as Dragon Man reaches behind to pull down Jonas’s selected design.

A snake eating its own tail, twisted into an infinity symbol.

The floor of the tattoo parlor is linoleum, but it’s as sticky as flypaper as Jonas stands from the chair. The skin of his inner right forearm burns with hours’ worth of inscriptions. Not for the first time, the tattoo artist remarks on Jonas’s stamina, his threshold for pain. “Never seen anything like it, brah. And definitely not in, well, a guy like you. Someone who comes off as, y’know, academic. No offense.”

“None taken. Thank you.” Jonas considers his new tattoo. The lines of equations glow with crimson halos on his skin. The artist is right to comment on Jonas’s tolerance. He had moments when he would have allowed himself to pass out but for the embarrassment and the possibility that the artist would stop. “You did very good work,” he offers.

“It’s no problem,” the man says. “But it is five hundred.”

Five hundred dollars that Jonas doesn’t have. “Where’s your cash machine?” he asks as casually as possible.

“In the back. On your left.”

Jonas nods his thanks and walks toward the rear of the parlor, where he finds a long hallway. He walks straight past the mobile ATM and into a unisex restroom. He locks the door behind him. The room is as small as a walk-in closet—smaller, in fact, than the one where he discovered his twin’s corpse. It smells just as bad. A fluorescent bar flickers overhead.

The mirror is scratched with crude hieroglyphs of male genitalia. Jonas catches his reflection beneath the graffiti. The face staring back at him reminds him more of Other Jonas than of himself. The stubbled face. The unkempt hair. The fatigued eyes that nevertheless burn with desperation. And the menagerie of bruises he’s accumulated in the past several hours. They mottle his skin beneath the eye and on the side of his jaw. He didn’t realize he looked so bad. It’s a miracle the tattoo artist didn’t comment on it or, worse, turn him away.

Jonas runs the tap and stoops to splash water on his face, as if that will improve his appearance. The water has a fetid smell. It runs down the sides of his face like tears.

He breathes deep, mentally preparing himself to risk his life by traversing the multiverse for the penultimate time. Once again, he pulls the tether off his finger. Once again, he unmoors himself from the universe and surfs the multiverse.

His entire body tingles. Electricity courses through him. The pangs in the core of his limbs return. The sensation of the quantum energies leaving his cells is a reminder that he has only one of these interuniversal trips left.